Interfaith Lecture Preview

With a three-step plan for reflection and reclaiming the definition of reality and the Divine, One River Foundation Co-Director Rabbi Rami Shapiro plans to enlighten his Chautauqua audience through his experiences and research on religion and spirituality.

Shapiro will give his lecture, titled “Seeing the Face of God in the Shadow of Our Dark Night,” at 2 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 4 in the Hall of Philosophy to continue Week Six of the Interfaith Lecture Series, “Embracing the Dark: Fertile Soul Time.”

He will first broadly look at the nature of reality to convey the point that people are all part of something bigger, known as God and the Divine.

“(My) second point is that we really never know how far in we are,” Shapiro said. “We are definitely in a very dark night of human civilization … a crucifixion of the human ego, brought about by the ego, by our greed, our fears, prejudices.”

He said he wants to emphasize how much of a downward spiral the world is in — economically, politically, biologically and environmentally. 

The third part of his lecture will ask “How do we get out?” by returning full-circle to his first point of manifesting God.

“The way we get out is to reclaim that knowledge, in a very existential way, that we viscerally experience the Divine itself,” Shapiro said.

The One River Foundation is a 501(c)(3) educational organization dedicated to  teaching Perennial Wisdom, also known as a philosophical perspective of dealing with reality, being and emphasizing mysticism.

Perennial Wisdom is considered the fourfold truth at the heart of religion: Everything is a manifestation of God; humans have a capacity to know Him directly through various contemplative practices; people can only engage with others according to the Golden Rule; and awakening to realize someone’s true nature with the Divine is the premise of engagement with compassion and justice.

Manifesting the Spirit and the Divine allows the fear, bias, madness — and everything else destroying human civilization — to come to a pause, Shapiro said. These things need to happen concurrently to allow the bad to absorb the good and become whole again.

“When you see that, you uniquely feel connected to (and) responsible for compassion,” Shapiro said. “Everything becomes an expression of God.”

He said he wants his audience to understand how dire the current situation the world is in, and how everyone has the individual ability to transform the situation if they’re willing to put the work in.

“We have the spiritual capacity to change the dynamic of the dark night so that it becomes a time of renaissance, a time of rebirth,” Shapiro said. 

Shapiro first experienced divinity at 16, and has been consumed by this experience ever since.

“It totally defined my life,” he said. “For decades, I have been motivated by that experience, and I’ve had that experience over and over again.”

At the time, Shapiro was studying Zen Buddhism and learning how to meditate. He was sitting on the shore of a lake in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, meditating alone, “when that self, my ego, simply disappeared.” It was essentially an out-of-body experience for Shapiro.

“I don’t know what happened while I was gone, because I wasn’t there, right? Rami was just emptied out and disappeared, gone to — I don’t know what to call it,” Shapiro said. “But when I came back into my normal, waking-state consciousness, I was acutely and definitively aware of everything. I felt this enormous love from everything, and for everything.”

Interpreting this through hindsight, Shapiro said he believes he somehow “tapped into the oneness,” of everything — and simultaneously nothing — around him.

“(I was) called to share that insight, which is not unique to me by any means,” he said.

Although this experience relates specifically to Zen Buddhism, Shapiro said every mystic tradition has similar teachings, all with insight and practices designed to awaken people to this wisdom.

“The fundamental thing I’m trying to accomplish is to help people realize who they think they are,” Shapiro said. “You’re actually the universe becoming conscious of itself, or God becoming conscious of itself. That’s what I’m trying to get across: That you are not who you think you are … and we should act accordingly.”

Fear is an inevitable part of life. Whether it’s self-induced, or from trauma or other outside influences, there is no life without fear. Monica Coleman, award-winning scholar, ordained minister and professor of Africana Studies at the University of Delaware, plans to share her personal experiences and how she helps others move through their fears in her lecture, “Learning to Lose,” at 2 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy to continue Week Six of the Interfaith Lecture Series, “Embracing the Dark: Fertile Soul Time.” 

Her main focus is to break barriers around the stigma of mental health, and encourage people to talk about their own experiences, and what they have, or wish they had, in regard to mental health.

“I’ll talk about why we should not be afraid of losing our minds or losing our lives, by which I mean, the way we think of ourselves,” Coleman said.

Coleman, who has had a lifelong battle with depression, said one of her suggestions is to make sure “you have someone you trust when you don’t trust yourself.”

She wants to emphasize how people live with depressive conditions and how people can receive the tools needed to face loss without slipping into a depressive episode. Rather than fighting loss, being angry about it, or being afraid of loss, she wants to accept it. Coleman said she feels “so much more deeply” when she accepts the loss rather than fighting it.

“A lot of the time, I was offering the resources I wish I had (or) writing the book I wish I could have read,” Coleman said. 

Everyone copes with loss differently, and Coleman said she particularly turns to God and the Spirit to empower her and to find the deeper calling in her life.

“I also think that many traditions actually have some concept of it being important to live well in the world and to make the world a better place,” Coleman said. “It’s not just about escaping the world, but also about transforming the world into the vision that the Divine has.”

Coleman was raised in a community where work, justice and faith were heavily intertwined. Her family saw these notions as part of one another, and she grew up to realize how community-inspired work and justice can become natural to someone.

“What I find the most rewarding is whenever somebody has encountered something I’ve written and it helps them to feel less alone in their own experience,” Coleman said. “I don’t know if I’m changing the world, but knowing that me being vulnerable and sharing part of my story with someone else so they’re not alone on their journey is, for me, the most rewarding.”

With an emphatic and delicate view toward religion and spirituality, author Mirabai Starr plans to enhance the view of “Dark Night of the Soul,” a poem by 16th-century Spanish mystic and priest St. John of the Cross.

Starr will give her analysis of the poem in her lecture, titled “Dark Nights of Our Souls: The Transformational Power of Spiritual Crisis,” at 2 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 2 in the Hall of Philosophy, adding to the Interfaith Lecture Series Week Six theme, “Embracing the Dark: Fertile Soul Time.”

“What I’m looking at is the classic teaching of the ‘Dark Night of the Soul,’ ” Starr said. “But, I am claiming it through what I would call a more feminist lens.”

Traditionally interpreted, the poem moves through periods throughout someone’s spiritual life. Starr said the classical perspective is that when everything in someone’s spiritual path “dries up” and people are no longer excited, their belief system unravels.

“What’s happening is we’re being stripped of our attachments, and our concepts of God, our attachments to the ways spiritual life is supposed to feel ecstatic or blissful,” Starr said. “… (And) all of our concepts about God and reality no longer make any sense to us.”

This idea of being stripped of spiritual attachments may make some feel like they’re doing something wrong, or experience the anxiety-inducing feeling that there’s going to be bad news. But, Starr said when people feel “spiritually naked,” they are prepared for a direct encounter with God.

“It’s about an inner state in the spiritual crisis,” Starr said. “It may be invisible to anyone else from the outside, but it’s really a beautiful, transformative portal.”

She wants her audience to realize that difficult experiences and feelings toward current events — climate change, women’s rights, unraveling democracy — are opportunities for this transformative experience to make people into “compassionate agents of change in the world.”

Incorporating the empathy of the human experience into her feminine perspective, Starr said people need to welcome these brokenhearted feelings to become more in tune with the world. She said that the masculine version would be about rising above, rather than letting the feelings become one with the soul.

“The hallmark of John’s teaching is about the power of radical not knowing, complete unknowing, and that is my way,” Starr said. 

Starr said it is important to both experience the world from a place of unknowing, and feel a sense of not knowing in “the midst of the world, so that we enter the suffering with our hearts open.” 

Not knowing is a cornerstone of accepting the reality of the spiritual world, she said. There must be a deep sense of surrendering control and allowing for innate curiosity; then the relationship between those two can be at the center of change.

“It’s a path of fire and transformation and that is challenging,” Starr said. “It’s challenging for me to walk it, and it’s challenging for me to invite other people to walk that path with me.”

Starr translated “Dark Night of the Soul” from Spanish to English, and said her translation is the most contemporary version in existence. She has studied Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism, and is unaffiliated with the Catholic Church, so her translation of the poem brings “this classic work to the 21st century in a brilliant and beautiful rendering.”

Starr said she hopes her audience will gain a renewed sense of hope and meaning. She wants them to realize there is beauty in hopeless times.

“When I share these teachings and I reclaim them through a feminine, relational, truth-telling lens, I see people change. I see hearts open,” Starr said. “I see people finding their own unique way to step up and (challenge) themselves as instruments in this world.”

Everyone struggles with something; whether it’s physically, mentally or spiritually, there’s always going to be that looming, anxiety-inducing challenge of how to love one another.

Week Six of the Interfaith Lecture Series, “Embracing the Dark: Fertile Soul Time,” focuses on “Dark Night of the Soul,” a 16th–century poem by Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross. 

Mark Nepo, poet and bestselling author of The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want By Being Present in the Life You Have, will present his lecture titled, “Heartwork: Being a Spirit in the World,” at 2 p.m. Monday, Aug. 1 in the Hall of Philosophy to start off this week’s theme.

“I plan on talking a little bit about where we are in this very difficult time after the pandemic, and there’s so much stridency and polarization in the world,” Nepo said. “The challenge (is), ‘How do we love each other forward?’ The old world is gone, and like it or not, we have to work together and respect each other in order to move into the new world.”

Planning to place this idea in context generationally, Nepo wants to focus on how details are different, but people still experience unanticipated challenges.

He said he wants to highlight “re-remembering what a gift it is to be here and that we need each other, and that we’re more together than alone.”

From an early age, everyone creates their own unique way they relate to life, he said. As a child, he remembers relating to the physical world before he knew what poetry or metaphors were. But now, he said he always sees the world as “a metaphor in images.”

In his early 30s, Nepo was diagnosed with — and almost died from — a rare form of lymphoma. He said the journey turned him “inside out and upside down.” Ever since then, he has referred to himself as a “student of all hats,” in his personal work and with others.

“Lifting up the unique gifts of each (hat), but the common call of all them has been at the heart of all of my books and all my teachings,” Nepo said.

In Chinese medicine, the word “spiritual” refers to anything that is life-giving. Nepo said he likes this, as it moves away from orthodox traditions, and encourages one to pay as much attention to the inner world as the outer world.

Tradition and family influence everyone. The challenge of being in the modern world, he said, is how to uncover how “beautiful and powerful” the worlds are when aligned.

The most rewarding part of his work is looking at the spiritual traditions inhabiting people’s lives. Nepo said he likes to recognize that everyone is human, and that being alive is a miracle.

“Despite all the ways we can record and playback, this is all unrepeatable. This is all right now,” Nepo said. “The challenge is ‘How do we put down our fear? How do we undo a lot of the patterns?’ ”

An avid lover of metaphors, Nepo considers the spirit moving through people similar to electrical wires. 

“Spirit can move through us and between us. It’s the way electricity runs through wires,” Nepo said. “Unless you turn on the switch, it’s just wired. Living a spiritual life, which means being open-hearted, being receptive and giving, that’s how we turn on the switch.”

With one foot in the door of the American dream, and one in the American nightmare, Wajahat Ali’s myriad experiences have led him down the path of fighting for justice.

To some, America may not “seem racist anymore,” but Ali, a writer, public speaker and former attorney, said this is not the case, and wants to make a three-step pitch to his Chautauqua audience.

Ali will give his lecture, “Go Back to Where You Came From: Or, How to Create the Ethnic Avengers,” at 2 p.m. Friday, July 29, in the Hall of Philosophy to close Week Five of the Interfaith Series Lecture “The Ethical Foundations of a Fully Functioning Democracy.”

He said he wants his audience to invest in “a multicultural coalition of the willing,” what he refers to as “the ethnic avengers.” 

He wants Chautauquans to invest in hope during hopeless times, and to understand why diversity and inclusivity is a win for everyone.

“I can tell you as a Brown dude and as a Muslim, as a person who has been living this and talking about this for a long time, that many of our fellow Americans thought that the election of Obama, in particular, signaled a post-racial America,” Ali said. 

He realized this as people referred to racism as “an old thing” and said to “stop whining and complaining, we’ve elected Obama.” Ali said this dialogue then did a complete 180 after the 2020 murder of George Floyd.

“That seemed to be an inflection point for many people to be like, ‘Oh we’ve got to talk about this,’ ” Ali said. “There’s a moment when people realize, ‘Oh, you have to fight for democracy. You have to fight for rights. You have to fight for freedom. And this thing called America, we took for granted, which we assumed was a multiracial democracy — even that we have to fight for.’ ”

Ali said the list of everything going wrong in America — climate change, human rights issues and abortion restrictions, to name a few — is “very depressing,” and can make some people seem selfish or cynical when it comes to fighting for rights.

“I think what we have witnessed, and are witnessing right now, is that it requires work,” Ali said. “But it also requires people to throw down in the ring and (realize) the avengers aren’t coming. You can’t outsource this problem.”

Describing his life as a constant back and forth flip of rags to riches, Ali said he has a unique experience of what America looks like through the lens of both the dream and the nightmare. He said he started out as a privileged suburban kid and lost everything after 9/11; his parents were in jail and lost their money, their credit and healthcare coverage, which led to the American nightmare.

Another formative experience for Ali occurred 10 years ago, when he had a near-death experience while at the gym. He had the pre-existing heart condition atrial fibrillation, and when he was on the treadmill, his heart rate spiked to 230 BPM, over double the average. 

“It made no sense, because I wasn’t doing anything strenuous,” Ali said. “It was just a very light workout, and so as a result of that, they had to defibrillate me three times to reset my heart rate.”

He then went into congestive heart failure and pulmonary edema, and his lungs were filling up with water.

“I almost didn’t make it,” Ali said. “As a result of surviving that, and then finally having the surgery, I thought, ‘Life is short.’ My only regret was if I die alone, I should’ve invested in a relationship, in a marriage. That was my one mistake. I should have started a family.”

Knowing to some this may sound crazy, Ali said as soon as he thought about getting married and starting a family, his heart rate finally stabilized.

“Maybe this was a sign from the universe,” Ali said, “Then somehow, like eight months after that, boom, got married. Still married.”

Ali said he will include personal stories, such as this near-death experience, in his public speaking. While not too formulaic, he said he sustains a similar approach in most of his talks. First, he will make his three points, then tell a specific personal story, which he uses as a “Trojan Horse” to introduce the lecture theme, and make the lecture more of a conversation.

This will be Ali’s second time speaking at Chautauqua — most recently in conversation with James Fallows in 2017 to examine American perception of Muslims post-9/11.

Ali said he’s a pragmatist, not a “wide-eyed, naive optimist,” and he understands the demons America is currently facing. But he wants people to leave with the belief that America is still worth fighting for.

“That moment of urgency has to be acknowledged and has to be met with a forceful response,” Ali said. “It’s going to require everyone to step up.”

People often question what their role is, if they’re doing enough, and what they could improve on to be a productive member of society. Anthea Butler, author and Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought at the University of Pennsylvania, offers a three-step guide to answer these questions.

Butler will give her lecture, “The Promise of the Polis: Guidance for Living in Trying Times,” at 2 p.m. Thursday, July 28, in the Hall of Philosophy for Week Five of the Interfaith Lecture Series theme “The Ethical Foundations of a Fully Functioning Democracy.”

Butler will begin her lecture by outlining the three-step guide.

“One, is that we have to think about what we look like as a society, and the comparison between what the Greeks were trying to do, and where our society is being fractured,” Butler said.

Next, she wants people to ponder what their place is in society. Then, ask how they can break out of the fractured society that has been created. 

“I think one of the things that I want to do is talk about what we’ve lost in being citizens of something greater than just our personal lives,” Butler said.

Butler said people need to focus more on how to get involved with taking care of others — along with their role and responsibility in the society they live in — rather than isolating themselves.

“They are part of something much bigger than themselves, and if we really are to survive this series of calamities … they will need to become involved in a different way, rather than sitting around listening to people,” Butler said.

Talking to the public personally through various forms of media is something Butler said she does well. She was the 2022 Marty Award winner, given by the American Academy of Religion; this award is presented to an individual whose work has helped advance the public understanding of religion.

“I think it is important to not just engage the public through writing; you talk to the public personally, through social media platforms, and you don’t stand apart from the public,” Butler said.

She said she will answer any question anyone asks about religion, politics or the two intertwined. Butler said she engages her social media audience the same way she does with students in her classroom, and it is how she plans to engage with Chautauquans. 

“(My lecture) gives people a balance of what they need,” Butler said. “I know that’s one of the questions they wanted answered this week: ‘Do we always need religion?’ I think the issue is that religion can help for a fully functioning democracy.”

But as of now, religion is breaking American democracy, Butler said, and people need to realize, hear and understand that using religion may be counterintuitive in the context of people who aren’t religious.

“I think it’s really important to talk about the ways in which religion, when it is used to put one group over another, really does not help democracy,” Butler said. “There also needs to be space for people who don’t have a use for religion. … It is not something that should be used to make people feel like that’s how they need to be part of the democratic process.”

Her commitment to her work stemmed from a dedication and interest in history and religion. She described her journey to share untold African American stories as “a war, lifetime–kind-of-work.” A facet of this work is her 2021 book, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in North America.

As an African American woman in the United States, Butler said her whole life has been spent working against racism, how people perceive her, and the treatment of people of color in this country.

“I don’t have some epiphany moment because that’s been my life,” Butler said. “I think that it’s really important for people to understand that some of us have to struggle through a whole bunch of different things just because of who we are.”

Democracy isn’t a one-man job. America is not a monarchy. Everyone is involved, from constituents to mayors and governors, all the way up to the White House. 

Adam Jortner, author and the Goodwin-Philpott Eminent Professor of Religion at Auburn University, wants people to gain the perspective of democracy as a necessity, not a luxury.

He will deliver his lecture, titled “The Gospel and the Ballot Box: A History,” at 2 p.m. Wednesday, July 27, in the Hall of Philosophy for Week Five of the Interfaith Lecture Series theme of “The Ethical Foundations of a Fully Functioning Democracy.”

Jortner wants to start with democracy as a process and how it happens.

“Democracy can occur under all kinds of interesting and different conditions that we’re not used to thinking about,” Jortner said. “I really want to talk about what democracy is and ways for everyone to create and sustain it … through a life of faith.”

People act according to their faith, Jortner said, but the dictation of faith does not make it oppose democracy. He wants people to be comfortable talking to others, regardless of differing beliefs or religious choices.

“I’d like to give people a roadmap for talking to their neighbors, which is really the essence of democracy,” Jortner said. “It’s something that’s really hard to do, but I want to encourage that kind of civic engagement, and give everybody some tips and tricks for making something that’s hard a little bit easier.”

Everyone has their own role to preserve democracy. In 2018, Jortner ran in the general election for Alabama State Board of Education and lost, but he said the experience was rewarding.

“It made me certainly feel a very deep kinship to all the people in my district, even though the vast majority of them, I did not know personally,” Jortner said. “That was a real blessing.”

Along with being able to talk to people with different beliefs, Jortner said it’s always a challenge when the democracy in question is ruled by strangers. His challenge as a historian and professor is to keep an open mind and listen carefully.

“You are putting your life and your liberty in the hands of people you’ve never met,” Jortner said. “Because of that, there is an obligation in democracy to build public trust and build civic engagement — even with people you don’t like (or) people you can’t stand.”

Diana Aviv grew up in a predominantly white part of Africa that experienced the apartheid regime, children taken from their families, and systemic racism. 

Now, as the former CEO of Feeding America, the Partnership for America Democracy, and Independent Sector, Aviv has a broad lens of why exactly America needs a fully-functioning democracy.

Aviv will give her lecture, titled “What Our Democracy Today Requires of its Citizens: An Inquiry into the Role of Everyday Citizens in Building the Next Democracy” at 2 p.m. Tuesday, July 26, in the Hall of Philosophy for Week Five of the Interfaith Lecture Series, themed “The Ethical Foundations of a Fully Functioning Democracy.”

“What we really need is a massive effort from people of goodwill across the United States to come together and make sure that we have a functioning, effective and strong democracy,” Aviv said. “If we fail to do it, the consequences are quite dire.”

Aviv emphasized that this is not an issue to toss aside, and said that tending to democracy is the most important thing all citizens have to face, because “our system is breaking; it’s failing.”

She wants people to recognize the severity of the downfall of democracy, and that it won’t resolve itself. 

“What’s at stake is the whole future of American society,”  said Aviv, who  also previously served on the  White House Council for Community Solutions

She wants her audience to go home and figure out ways to get involved in changes to protect American democracy.

Thoughout her career, Aviv has worked with domestic violence issues, the anti-apartheid movement and with people facing the dealth penalty.

When her father was 11, he and his family fled from Poland to South Africa to escape anti-Semitism before World War II broke out, but the cruelties were still there, just targeted at a different demographic.

“As a child growing up in South Africa, I saw the horrors of a system that treated some people, just on the basis of their skin color, in a completely different way than others,” Aviv said.

Witnessing this explicit racism, Aviv said she often had privileges or opportunities that someone who was the same as her, with a different skin color, was barred from having.

“I just thought it was wrong. I thought it was despicable for them. It’s not fair to them,” Aviv said. “It meant that whatever I got was because of the skin color — not because of my expertise or knowledge or talent or anything I did — because I was protected.”

When she was a child in South Africa, her family’s housekeeper had a 2-year-old daughter. Aviv said the law at the time dictated that if anyone had children in the towns they worked in, the children had to be sent to the homelands, which were separate areas the South African government created to carry out the forced removal of Black citizens from urban areas. The housekeeper’s daughter was taken from her mother and placed in the designated homeland. 

“That child, up until age 2, was with us every day in the house, and suddenly their child wasn’t there anymore,” Aviv said. “I couldn’t even begin to imagine a society that rips a child from the mother, and then strips their child of any right to come back into the society because they’ve now been sent to one of these crazy homelands.”

Seeing this, and being a part of a youth organization, helped Aviv develop her passion for social justice, where she said she could work with other youth leaders to better understand these wrongdoings and how to fix them.

“What I learned was that when people could have a hatred for another, (they could) try and destroy them in their totality,” Aviv said. “That’s why the apartheid regime so resonated, because it had happened to my own people, or my father and his family.”

Aviv said knowing all of this history made her wary of governmental systems because of the “hierarchy of whiteness” and how it undermines the efforts to make sure these social injustices don’t happen again.

“Always, my life has been about making love fairer for others and creating more opportunity, so that everybody has a fair chance in life,” she said.

Human beings are given many gifts, whether they’re seen as such or not. Being alive and experiencing nature — the wind rustling through the trees and birds chirping — are some of these gifts.

Artist and Faithkeeper Diane Schenandoah of Wolf Clan of the Oneida Nation in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy works to make sure all people are caretakers of the Earth.

Schenandoah will give her lecture, titled “Our Journey of Being,” at 2 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy for the Interfaith Lecture Series Week Four theme “The Future of Being.” Activist Belvie Rooks, originally slated to speak for today’s lecture, will give her presentation at a later date. 

Schenandoah said she wants her audience to understand the role humans have to take care of not only their communities, but also their family and nature as a whole. 

“I’m hoping that more will come away with the understanding of our gifts that we’ve been given: the Earth, Mother Earth, all the things that she provides for us,” Schenandoah said. “There’s so many gifts that we’ve been given, and we run through our daily lives, we kind of forget about the importance of these things.”

The importance of preserving the Earth is vital, and Schenandoah said it’s disappointing to see the depletion of Earth’s natural resources.

“I did try to speak to a lot of elementary schools, as well, about the importance (of water supply),” Schenandoah said. “I always like to ask young people ‘Who brushed your teeth today?’ You’d like the water to come out nice and clean, and that water is an element that we need to give thanks to, and make every effort to ensure that our waters stay clean.”

Her mother was also a faithkeeper of the Wolf Clan, so Schenandoah learned early on the matters of diplomacy, responsibility and how to help a community grow and better itself. Schenandoah said her mother’s role as faithkeeper was a big influence on her decision when the community asked her to become the faithkeeper.

She works at Syracuse University as their Honwadiyenawa’sek, meaning “the one who helps them.” This is the first position of its kind at Syracuse and is part of their diversity and inclusion initiative after concerns were raised by Indigenous students.

“My work is grounded in my culture and traditional Haudenosaunee teachings, along with the techniques of hands-on energy work, art therapy, tuning forks, acupressure, dream interpretations and self-empowerment,” Schenandoah said.

Director of Religion Maureen Rovegno said she is delighted to bring in Schenandoah’s perspective of spirituality.

“Diane Schenandoah brings the gift of the spirituality of our Native peoples, whose Indigenous ways of being offer us a paradigm that can both transform humanity and ensure the continuing health of our precious Earth home,” Rovegno said. “We welcome Diane’s rich source of knowledge and wisdom to our conversation in this consciousness-transformative week.”

Not many people have the multitude of experiences they wish they did. As a lawyer, ordained minister, professor and former president and CEO of the NAACP, Cornell William Brooks has a plethora of wisdom, advice, knowledge and experience to offer Chautauqua.

Brooks will be giving his lecture, titled “The Moral Inflation of Human Dignity: Race, Repair and Rights,” to continue Week Three of the Interfaith Lecture Series on “The Spirituality of Human Rights,” at 2 p.m. Thursday, July 14, in the Hall of Philosophy.

His main points will cover the dignity of human rights, and protecting the integrity of human beings. He said human rights movements have been reduced to social media phenomenons, such as #BlackLivesMatter and the reaction to the overturn of Roe v. Wade.

“When we see, simultaneously, protesters asserting the dignity of the unborn, we’re also seeing the dignity of women who are grown and born (attacked),” Brooks said. “This is a moment in which people in the midst of this democracy and others feel as though human dignity is under attack and under assault.”

Brooks said while dignity may not be able to be destroyed, it can be diminished, denigrated and desecrated. 

“Life is seen as fragile and tenuous, easily taken,” Brooks said. “In the case of people who were profiled or assaulted on the streets, then the value of human life (and) the value of human dignity is deemed … as being worth more.”

The differences between human rights and social justice is something Brooks compares to the differences between the alphabet and vocabulary of a democratic society.

“Civil rights provides us with the basic alphabet for (a) democratic society,” Brooks said. “Social justice is its vocabulary, the language, the means through which we speak and speak into existence.”

Brooks said regardless of where someone is on the spectrum of religious belief, from devout believer to atheist, it cannot be argued that faith isn’t the base of human rights.

“You can’t ignore the fact that people have faith on the frontlines of social justice in every movement, everywhere around this country and certainly around the world,” Brooks said. “Faith is essential. … You have to have it.”

During his tenure as NAACP president, which he described as a “tumultuous time,” Brooks said he guided the organization through critical social justice movements.

“When I took that job, within eight days, Eric Garner was killed in New York City in a chokehold,” Brooks said. “Within a few weeks, Ferguson exploded, thereafter was (when) Tamir Rice was killed in Cleveland. … Desecrated human beings, hashtag after hashtag, the entire time I was there.”

Brooks organized and led a walk in summer 2015 to demonstrate the urgency of voting rights and police reform. The participants ventured over 1,000 miles from Selma, Alabama, to Washington. He walked alongside a man named Middle Passage, 68, a Navy veteran who carried the American flag the entire journey.

“It began to rain (and) he literally wrapped the flag up so it would be protected from the elements,” Brooks said. “Then the rain stops, the clouds part and he unfurls the flag. As he unfurls the flag he collapses to the ground and has a heart attack.”

The hardest day during his time at the NAACP was explaining to young people in the organization how Passage died and what he stood for.

“The young people asked ‘If a man was willing to march and die for the right to vote, why can’t we fight and vote?’  ” Brooks said. “That is affecting me profoundly, for a couple of reasons. I called for that march, and as a consequence somebody, a friend of mine, literally gave his life. That’s the kind of moral punctuation to the work.”

Brooks attended Jackson State University for his undergraduate education. Jackson State is most commonly, and unfortunately, known for a shooting by police at a dormitory on campus; it was the culmination of tensions between police and local youths that resulted in the death of two young Black men. This shooting occurred in the wake of the 1970 Kent State University shooting during Vietnam War protests, which resulted in the death of four students and the injury of nine by the Ohio National Guard.

Brooks attended Jackson State about 10 years after the shooting and still remembers the ghost-like quality he felt walking across campus.

“Standing on the Gibbs-Green Plaza, looking up to your left, (about) three to four stories up, you can see in the women’s dormitory at the time, Alexander Hall, you can still see bullet holes 10 years later,” Brooks said. “You’re not just walking past the memorials to young people your age, you literally saw the bullet holes made by the weapons (used) to kill them.”

Brooks walked across this plaza every day on his way to class, and he said it’s a reminder that social justice “was a matter and a concern for people my age. I learned that lesson immediately just walking across the plaza, (and it) just affected me profoundly.”

Social justice is also not limited to the race or any other identity that may be under attack. Brooks said for white people to be good allies, they need to act rather than just echoing people of color.

“It’s also a matter of white people telling other white people how to support a movement,” Brooks said. “It’s a matter of white people lending, sharing (and) investing whatever they have in terms of their resources. Then (to realize) the legitimacy and credibility of people of color — realizing and recognizing that people of color can lend credibility and legitimacy to them.”

During his time at Jackson State, Brooks attended a lecture given by a speaker who asked three questions that affected him profoundly, and still do.

“First question he asked, ‘How many of you believe that America, generally speaking, is a great country?’ People raised their hands in the affirmative,” Brooks said. “Then he asked, ‘How many of you have read the Constitution in its entirety?’ No one raised their hands, including me.”

The speaker then asked questions in regard to religion.

“He asked, ‘How many of you believe in God?’ Everybody raised their hand,” Brooks said. “Then he asked, ‘How many of you read the Bible in its entirety?’ No one, including me.”

He then asked how many people believed Martin Luther King Jr. was a great man; everybody raised their hands. Next, he asked how many had read all of King’s books. Again, no one, including Brooks, raised their hand.

“I walked out of that auditorium embarrassed by my own ignorance and resolved to read the Bible from cover to cover, the Constitution in all its entirety (and) Martin Luther King’s books in all their entirety,” Brooks said. “There’s a massive amount of reading with respect to law and prophetic ministry, and in the case of Dr. King and in terms of the Bible, that put me on the path to law and ministry and I’ve been on that path the last several decades.”

Brooks said his hope is that his lecture today lives on, and not just end when he’s done speaking.

“It’s my hope that my few words live in people’s hearts and inspire them in the same way that the thought that I heard many decades ago inspired me and changed my life,” he said.

The sociologist became a criminologist, then went into insurance and banking. Next, a broadcast journalist. Now a philanthropist and author. This is the broad spectrum of careers Georgette Bennett has held, intertwining throughout her life.

Bennett’s work focuses on conflict resolution and intergroup relations. She speaks at 2 p.m. Friday, July 1, in the Hall of Philosophy on “When America’s Global Conscience Fails: How the Syrian Crisis Upended the World Order and How Individual Conscience Can Help to Put it Right.” 

“In the case of Syria, there was a massive failure of America’s global conscience,” Bennett said. “That failure occurred on a couple of different levels on foreign policy failure, which I will talk about, but also a failure of humanity, a failure of our policy for refugees and displaced persons.”

She said the consequences have been massive in terms of both death counts, and geopolitics. Her hope for her closing presentation of the Week One Interfaith Lecture Series theme of America’s Global Conscience” is to motivate, inspire and empower her audience.

“I hope rather than despairing about what goes on at the macro level, that it will inspire people to take action at the micro level,” Bennett said.

Her several career paths are all interwoven, Bennett said, and can all be tied back to her work as a sociologist. Bennett said she still uses resources from that job.

“Even though these seem like very diverse careers, all of them have a common thread,” Bennett said. “For all of them I use my sociologist’s tool kit in terms of the way I approach the work.”

Bennett founded the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding in 1992, to continue her late husband, Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum’s legacy. 

She has also founded multiple organizations to help displaced people and refugees.

“When (my husband) died he left me very inspired,” Bennett said. “I just decided that nothing I had been doing in my professional life was as important as building on his work. At the time that he died, there were at least 50 conflicts being waged around the world based, at least in part, on religion.”

Bennett said these conflicts had caused the number of displaced people to rise from 40 million in the world at the time, to 100 million, where it sits in 2022.

In 2013, she founded the Multifaith Alliance for Syrian Refugees. Bennett and her family had been Hungarian refugees who escaped the Holocaust and relocated to Queens, New York, so it’s an issue close to her heart.

“At the age of 67, in 2013, I read a report on the Syrian crisis issued by the International Rescue Committee. As a child of the Holocaust and a refugee myself, I was stunned by the magnitude of Syrian suffering,” Bennett told Forbes in 2021. 

Throughout her life, Bennett has supported victims of religion-based war.

“I’m also going to tell a personal story about how one individual can confront a massive humanitarian crisis and the formula I used to address it,” Bennett said, “which resulted in delivering — as of now, but still counting — over $250 million worth of aid, most of it directly benefiting 2.7 million Syrian war victims.”

Some habits start in childhood; some are learned and some are trained. The brain’s neurological wiring is susceptible to all of these beginnings, and all of them affect people’s behavior. 

Satpal Singh, a professor at SUNY Buffalo in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, specializes in behavioral pharmacology and neurobiology. 

He will speak at 2 p.m. Thursday, June 30, in the Hall of Philosophy with a lecture titled “Global Consciousness in an Interconnected World” for the Interfaith Lecture Series’ Week One theme of “America’s Global Conscience.” 

In the context of America’s global conscience, his main points include asking the questions: Where have we been, where are we and where do we hope to be headed? He said the most important aspect of effectively coexisting is that people are connected with themselves and interconnected with their countries.

“We cannot exist by ignoring others, because that impacts us just as our behavior (does),” Singh said.

For Singh, there is a clear connection between people’s behaviors toward each other and coexisting religiously. 

“I (was once) a target of very serious religion-based wars,” Singh said. “That opened my eyes to the need for bringing in interfaith harmony and living in peace with each other.”

The internal assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, murdered by her Sikh bodyguards, resulted in waves of massacres across India. Singh became a victim of that violence when he was traveling by train to start a new job; a mob beat him unconscious and then threw his seemingly lifeless body off the train. After this, he was motivated to begin working in human rights.

Singh attended Panjab University in Chandigarh, India, received his doctorate in molecular biology at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, and has been with SUNY Buffalo as a professor since 1989. His work at the Sikh Council for Interfaith Relations and the World Sikh Council, among other organizations, has made him a leader in his field. In 2015, during Pope Francis’ first visit to the United States, Singh was present for an interfaith gathering at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. 

Singh shared a Sikh prayer at the event.

“I think a lot of people are quite aware of the need for living in harmony among one another,” Singh said.

Violence and rancor across the world are only hurting people and their faith, Singh said.

“Hatred and violence against what we generally perceive as Other is not conducive for living in peace and harmony for any country,” Singh said.

He believes basic fundamentals are similar in all religions, and that there’s misunderstanding on how to use these fundamentals to create peace and harmony.

“The idea there is to hold interfaith dialogues about issues that are important to all of us,” Singh said. “Obviously some of these things we cannot affect too much, but things like hatred and violence within our own borders (needs to be addressed).”

MAX ZAMBRANO – STAFF WRITER

Closing the 2021 Interfaith Lecture Series at 1 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 25 in the Amphitheater is author, speaker and preacher Diana Butler Bass.

Her lecture, titled “Get Up and Go On — Together,” will also close the Interfaith Series’ take on Week Nine’s theme, “Resilience.” 

“Bass is a global thinker from both her head and her heart,” said Director of Religion Maureen Rovegno.

Bass has authored 11 books, her most recent being Freeing Jesus: Rediscovering Jesus as Friend, Teacher, Savior, Lord, Way, and Presence, published this past March. In it, Bass depicts her evolving perspective of Jesus. 

“Freeing Jesus explores the many images of Jesus we encounter and embrace through a lifetime — and how we make theology from the text of our lives in conversation with scripture and tradition,” reads the book’s synopsis. “Freeing Jesus invites us to liberate Jesus and free ourselves when it comes to the ever-compelling and yet often-elusive figure at the center of Christian faith.”

Publishers Weekly has named two of her books, Strength for the Journey (2002) and Christianity for the Rest of Us (2006) among the best books of the respective year. Her book Grateful: The Transformative Power of Giving Thanks (2018) earned the Wilbur Award for best nonfiction book of the year from the Religion Communicators Council, as did Grounded: Finding God in the World (2015). Grounded was also named book of the year by the Religion Newswriters Association.

“(Bass) writes and speaks with great insight, with acuity, with intelligence and with depth of compassion and caring,” Rovegno said. “Hers is the perfect voice to bring this week’s conversation, not to closure, but to a breadth of motivated understanding for the going forward of our days and years.”

Bass has had bylines for several national media outlets including The New York Times and The Washington Post, and she has made appearances on numerous outlets like CBS, CNN, PBS and NPR. 

“Diana’s passion is sharing great ideas to change lives and the world,” says her website, “a passion that ranges from informing the public about spiritual trends, challenging conventional narratives about religious practice, entering the fray of social media with spiritual wisdom and smart theology and writing books to help reader see themselves, their place in history and God differently.”

Bass has visited Chautauqua before for the Interfaith Lecture Series. In 2016, she spoke about cosmopolis amid globalization and a new understanding of God beyond tradition. Two years later, she discussed the intersection of sports and spirituality. 

As the 2021 Summer Assembly draws to a close, Rovegno reflected on the season “with great gratitude that our work in planning has borne such abundant fruit. The goal is always to present new ideas to our Chautauqua family, with an emphasis on ‘new.’ We never want to present what our intelligent and caring audiences already know.”

Rovegno said this year’s speakers added insightful perspectives every week, each being an “angle of vision” to the Chautauqua Lecture Series. 

“I like to quote the famous Mr. T from ‘The A-Team,’ ” Rovegno said. “I love it when a plan comes together!”

MAX ZAMBRANO – STAFF WRITER

Colum McCann is all about bringing people together, no matter what seemingly insurmountable obstacles might exist.

He’s done so most recently in his February 2020 novel Apeirogon, which in mathematics means a polygon with a countably infinite number of sides. In his novel, it’s the story of one Palestinian, Bassam Aramin, and one Israeli, Rami Elhanan — men taught to hate each other who instead form a friendship over grief: Both of their daughters were killed in conflict over the Holy Land.

“When they learn of each other’s stories, they recognize the loss that connects them,” reads a Penguin Random House synopsis. “Together they attempt to use their grief as a weapon for peace — and with their one small act, start to permeate what has for generations seemed an impermeable conflict.”

McCann will speak at 1 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 24 in the Amphitheater for his lecture, titled “Resilience: The Life You Find in Your Stories,” part of Week Nine’s Interfaith Lecture Series themed “Resilience.”

While a fictional novel, Aramin and Elhanan are two real people that McCann met through his organization, Narrative 4.

“Narrative 4 is a global nonprofit story exchange organization, fronted by artists and teachers and activists, using storytelling to change the world,” McCann said.

McCann, inspired by the men’s ability to see themselves in each other, wanted to tell their story. 

“Apeirogon … uses their real-life stories to begin another — one that crosses centuries and continents, stitching together time, art, history, nature and politics in a tale both heartbreaking and hopeful,” according to the synopsis. “The result is an ambitious novel created out of a universe of fictional and nonfictional material, with these fathers’ moving story at its heart.”

McCann hopes readers listen to the story of the men’s friendship, and how it was formed despite growing up on opposite sides of the conflict that took their daughters’ lives. 

“I hope that people will listen to their message that we don’t have to love one another across differences, or even like one another, but we better learn to understand each other,” McCann said. “Otherwise, as Bassam says, we will all meet each other six feet below ground.”

Narrative 4 has produced other success stories, McCann said. A recent program brought together high school students from the Bronx with ones from rural Appalachia, which he described as mostly Black, urban, left-wing kids with white, rural, right-wing kids. 

“Some of the young people admitted that they were nervous to the point of being unable to talk at first,” he said. “But when they began telling stories to one another — and then telling those stories back to their partners — the fear faded, their imaginations expanded and they began to see the world in an altogether different way.”

He also mentioned a current program in the Joe Slovo township of South Africa, where kids initiated a “Trash to Treasure” program to clean up neighborhoods. 

“All of this came from the courageous act of listening,” he said. 

McCann also wrote Let the Great World Spin, a novel that earned him the 2009 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2011 International Dublin Literary Award, one of the highest paid literary awards in the world. 

His 2013 novel, TransAtlantic, brought comparisons to Michael Ondaatje and Toni Morrison. Apeirogon is longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and Carnegie Medal. 

For today’s lecture, McCann wants to talk about courage alongside resilience.

“I also want to talk about the art of storytelling and how important it is for us to understand one another in an increasingly atomized world,” he said.

Telling stories about what happens when people observe the complexity and difficulty of their lives keeps McCann going each day, he said.

He described the men from Apeirogon as courageous and empathetic.

“There is a line from an ancient Arabic poem: ‘Is there any hope that this desolation can bring us solace?’ ” McCann said. “They are the hope.”

MAX ZAMBRANO – STAFF WRITER

On the morning of Oct. 27, 2018, as Shabbat services took place, a gunman opened fire on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing 11 people. 

Rabbi Hazzan Jeffrey Myers was there. 

“In the aftermath of the massacre … Myers has stood out for his indefatigable moral clarity and inspired spiritual leadership,” wrote Michael Weis, a friend of Myers, in a November 2018 post on Cantors Assembly.

Myers will present his lecture, “A Ticket to Ride: The Roller Coaster of Resilience,” at 1 p.m. Monday, Aug. 23 in the Amphitheater. It is the first of three Interfaith Lectures for Week Nine, the final week of the season, dedicated, as is the Chautauqua Lecture Series, to the theme of “Resilience.”

“Resilience is a characteristic of humanity and all of nature that ensures continuity of life — a virtue among virtues to be prized and practiced to create a future,” said Director of Religion Maureen Rovegno. “It is important to celebrate this essential characteristic this week, as we recognize what we as a community, and indeed as a world people, are living and must continue to value.”

Before moving to Pittsburgh in 2017, Myers spent decades in ministry in New Jersey and Long Island. He also earned a master’s degree in Jewish education from the Jewish Theological Seminary. 

“The ability to manage and administrate and act in a politically savvy manner, all the while placing his ego in check and putting the welfare of his community members first is the hallmark of a great clergy person, no matter the title of rabbi or cantor,” Weis wrote. 

Myers’ words following the shooting, the worst attack on the Jewish community in United States history, left an imprint and offered healing, Weis said. 

“They floated through the air with grace and reached our ears with unparalleled perfection in the moment of need,” he wrote for Cantors Assembly. “By his words, the cries for hope were heeded; the need for healing was attended; the prayer for peace was delivered and the promise of a tomorrow void of hate was handed over to the collective whole through his words, both penned and uttered.”

In a November 2018 article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Tree of Life Rabbi Emeritus Alvin Berkun described Myers as “America’s rabbi,” but Myers, in the same article, said it was never about him.

“It’s about hate,” Myers said in the article. “How tragic it was that people without an ounce of hate had hate inflicted on them.”

He then called for the shooting to be a watershed moment.

“As easily as we spew hate, we also can spew love,” he said. “To me, if that can begin to happen, then the deaths of these 11 people will not be in vain. If there’s no change whatsoever, then it confirms our worst fears about the path we’re heading down, and it’s the wrong path.”

In 2018, Myers received an honorary doctoral degree in Jewish music from the Jewish Theological Seminary. In 2019, he was one of three recipients of the Simon Wiesenthal Center Medal of Valor.

“Medals of Valor were given out to those who exemplify the good deeds of outstanding individuals who honor mankind and whose courage and bravery shine a light in the darkest of places,” said a press release issued by the Center. “Myers’ medal had the inscription, ‘He who saves a single life, it is as if he saved an entire world.’ ”

Looking at this week and today’s lecture, Rovegno said resilience answers the question of what drives people to keep going despite all of life’s challenges. 

“The Jewish people have been resilient for millennia,” she said. “In our time, resilience now uniquely defines the congregation that Myers leads.”

MAX ZAMBRANO – STAFF WRITER

What is “post” about postliberal theology? Nancey Murphy, with her late husband, wondered that at a conference with several lectures dedicated to the subject. 

“We realized these were philosophers who, in a sense, were redefining the questions that had plagued modern philosophy for 300 years,” she said. 

Modern philosophers believed there needed to be a solid foundation in order to build knowledge, she said. Then, she went on, the American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine helped question that. 

Postmodern philosophers, like Quine, see knowledge more like a web or net in that it is all interconnected, she said. 

“When we’re dealing with knowledge problems, we’re never starting from nothing and building all the way from the ground up,” she said. 

Murphy, a senior professor of Christian philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, will present her lecture “We Are Our Souls: Multi-Aspect Monism in Christian Thought” at 1 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 18 in the Amphitheater, the final Week Eight Interfaith Lecture themed “The Human Soul: Our Ineffable Mystery.”

Murphy has given over 200 lectures around the world, including in Iceland, South Africa, China, Australia, Russia and Iran. She has written and edited dozens of books and volumes. In 1992, she won the American Academy of Religion award for excellence for her first book, Theology in the Age of Scientific Reasoning.

She will use postmodern philosophy to tackle this week’s theme. One way to think of postmodern philosophy, she said, is language. 

The word “dog,” for example, is the familiar four-legged furry pet — this is simple, she said.

“What about when you get to abstract concepts?” she said. “What do they refer to? How do we get their meaning? The answer is not to think of the word over here on one side and language over there on the other.” 

It’s to recognize language itself as a part of our world. They are already interwoven. It’s not ever a problem of starting from scratch. … It’s a problem of finding words.”

For her lecture, Murphy said there will be overlap with Ori Soltes’ Interfaith Lecture from Monday (see Page 5).  

In the first section, she will discuss the soul in Christianity from Biblical times through the rest of the millennium. 

Biblical scholars believed the soul was not separate from the body, but rather a part of a whole person’s being, she said, making it a monistic viewpoint instead of dualistic. She will then discuss how this was later influenced by Greek philosophy, putting a dualistic lens on Christian teaching. 

Catholics were influenced by Aristotle, Murphy said, who believed plants and animals had souls which had similar aspects as a human soul. Plants provide the powers for growth and reproducing, and animals provide desires like thirst and emotions, she said. 

Protestants and Catholics carried on this teaching until the beginning of the 20th century, she said, when Biblical scholars realized the same word could have different interpretations by people who lived centuries apart, she said. They thought life after death meant bodily resurrection. 

Today, people question if humans even have souls.

“Do we actually need to have a soul to explain our abilities?” Murphy said. “Or is it just because we have such an incredibly complex, flexible brain in such complex cultures, with a long history of thinking in various ways?”

Her second section will answer the question of how humans started believing in an inner spirituality rather than bodies acting in the world, she said. 

Murphy will also discuss near-death experiences, like Interfaith Lecturer Bruce Greyson did on Tuesday, and whether that idea supports dualism. 

Postmodern philosophy may help dispel some mystery with the soul, she said. 

“The soul is only a mystery if you don’t know all the history,” Murphy said. “What is really the mystery is: What does it mean to be resurrected?”